Today, the network presents a significant management overhead, especially in the virtual infrastructure. Programmable central management of networks, ports, and network services is critical to the success of allowing enterprise customers to evolve their operations to cloud-scale. This raises an issue that is front and center in the vision of software defined datacenter.
Today's network management constructs allow distributed configuration and scale-out of the virtual network but are tightly coupled to the compute management elements. This implicitly binds any solution to artificial constraints which are far exceeded by today's datacenter requirements of scale, configuration, and distribution for cloud networking. This expansion of virtual networks in harmony with network management orchestration is targeting the goal of a truly elastic datacenter.
One of the drawbacks of the current networking architecture is its tight coupling to the physical compute infrastructure and compute management layers. Today, if network administrators would like to manage the physical infrastructure, they must login into several physical switches. Today, in the virtual infrastructure, if a customer would like to manage the deployment of networks, they must log into several different compute manager instances. There is no central management portal for virtual networks, virtual ports and network services across the virtual infrastructure.